John Adams said the Constitution is only for a moral and religious people. I believe the same is true of Capitalism, and the further we get away from our Christian roots, the more everything crumbles.

Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thank you for being here. I want to talk about Titus in this episode, mostly because no one ever quotes Titus, but it's in there. It's a book of the Bible. I mentioned it on the show today. It all started with last week talking about capitalism. 

And I made the claim, we all know the John Adams quote, where he said, our constitution is only for a moral and religious people. He was writing a letter to the Massachusetts militia. He said, while our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many other parts of the world, while she continues sincere and incapable of insidious and impious policy, if we continue to be good, then we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence. But should the people of America once become capable of that deep, simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practicing iniquity and extravagance. So we say one thing, but we do another. And displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapin and insolence. 

Rapin is stealing stuff, I think. The violent seizure of someone's property. The last line here is where is it going to go? Then this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. That its avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. 

There's no government in the world, John Adams said, that can stop people from being greedy, ambitious, all the rest. Those sins, those vices, would break through a Constitution like a whale goes through a net. And that's when John Adams says our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. One of the all -time great quotes. And I made the claim that just like that is true, capitalism is also only made for a moral and religious people. 

And we had a fine conversation on the SiriusXM show. We had a bunch of Ayn Rand capitalists call in and say, no, capitalism is the moral system. I was making the claim that no, capitalism is a tool. Who is using the tool? That's the question. On today's show, I talked about how this government shutdown, which is coming to an end now, it really revealed a lot of problems with our country. 

Just like COVID, COVID revealed a lot of problems with our country too. We didn't do anything about them. I fear we're not going to do anything about the problems that were revealed now, but we live in a country apparently with 42 million people on food stamps. That's not good. We also live in a country where a good percentage of it, good percentage of the people here can't survive missing one or two paychecks. I remember growing up, I was told two things about money, one directly from my mom. 

She would say a credit card is only for a moral and religious people. No, she would say, well, kind of, but she'd say, you got to pay the credit card off. You must always, I didn't even know what a credit card was. Like she would tell me this when I was like five. She said, you have to pay off the credit card. Always and only pay off the credit card. 

I didn't, I literally did not know what that meant, but it was drilled into me. My mom drilled that into me. I really don't remember my parents saying anything else about money. I'm sure they did, but I don't remember any of the lessons as starkly as I remember that one. Pay off your credit card every single month. So I've always done that. And I just remember through osmosis hearing that you should have three to six month emergency fund. 

I remember hearing stuff like, you should save 10 % of your paycheck. I just remember hearing these things growing up, and not many people do that. 47 % of Americans have a three month savings. 47%, 53 % of Americans, now a majority, have $1 ,000 or less in savings. Now I'm not judging. Well, I am judging, this is bad. 

But I'm not judgmental, because I could be one of those people too. I thought of Romans, excuse me, Titus three, because I was teaching in school, and church, Sunday school. I'm honored to be asked to teach through Romans with another gentleman in church. So we alternate. And I did Romans 13 last week. Obey the government. 

That one. I should have recorded him. Put him here. Sorry, I forgot to do that. But I had a section about how we need to pray for our leaders. And I quoted Titus three. 

Here's what Paul wrote to Titus. He said, remind them that your church. Who is that? Who is that? 

Jamie. 

Hey, buddy boy. 

What do you got? 

You got what? 

Of what? That's a necklace. That is so cool. 

I love it. 

What's on it? 

Oh, not a leaf. 

It comes from a bird. What is it? 

No, it's not a bird. It's a feather on a bird, you boy, you. You wanna go play ball? Okay, can I be there in a few minutes? Wanna play what? 

In a goal? 

Okay, you wanna drive and go where Jack Socker is. Okay, I love you. Hey, in like 10 minutes, we gotta go get Jack and Grace and John, okay? Okay, love you, buddy boy. There goes James, now a three -year -old. Titus three, remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient. 

I don't like that. 

To be ready. For every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, to show perfect courtesy towards all people. Why? Because I don't like any of that stuff. We're America. We rebel. 

So why should we be submissive to rulers and authorities? No. Here's why. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us. Not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. 

So that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. I love that so much. He's saying we need to pray for our leaders because that as wicked as they are, that was us. That was us before we were saved. And it would be us if Jesus didn't save us. So now that we are saved, we have to pray for our leaders. 

We have to pray that they are saved too. And I think about this with people who are bad with money. I could very easily be bad with money. I'm not bad with money because I'm cheap. I'm just naturally cheap. Just don't spend money because I'm cheap. 

So when 53 % of Americans have $1 ,000 or less, and a lot of that is because, I don't know what percentage of people, it's because of just bad financial decisions. Just bad, horrible financial decisions. I listen to enough Dave Ramsey. You have people call in, make $100, $200 ,000 a year, and they're in debt. Bad financial decisions. I saw this clip of the show Financial Audit. 

People go in and they show the guy there. They go through their finances and the guy yells at him. It's like an extreme Dave Ramsey because they get yelled at. This guy works for, he does DoorDash. He's got two kids, two kids and a wife. He does DoorDash. 

He will DoorDash to his car as he's DoorDashing. DoorDash costs $10. I remember I looked at when DoorDash first came out years ago, I looked at it, I was like, Oh, okay. I don't really like food delivery because it's cold. So it doesn't, but I looked at it, I was like, Oh, what's this about? It was 10, I forget what it was, but it was so much money. 

I was like, that's ridiculous. I'm never going to have this delivered. Like what's the point of that? Cause I'm cheap. And I just looked it up because it came up through the day on the show, $10 to have your food delivered. And then it's another 75 cents per mile beyond five miles. 

So like you could have, you could buy a $10 hamburger, and then you get a cold hamburger and it ends up costing you $30. 

What in the world? So this guy's out door dashing and he's so lazy that he has door dash, door dash, to his car. And he admitted that it costs him two hours of work to pay for the DoorDash. Okay, that's a bad financial decision. That's not, that's not, oh, poor him. 

Oh, he's so poverty stricken. No, that's just an idiot making terrible decisions about money. That could be me. So we need to help people who make bad decisions. I have sympathy for people who make bad decisions. That could be me. I just happen to be cheap. 

Until I wasn't, that doesn't mean I was good with money. I was cheap. That doesn't mean I'm good with money. And I wasn't good with money until I was saved by a financial advisor. This is not to excuse people for their foolish behavior. I like explainers. 

I don't like excuses, but we all have to do better. We all have to do better. I am. I'm happy to blame all sorts of things. I will blame illegal aliens. I'll blame TikTok. 

I'll blame China. I'll blame Mexican drug cartels. I'll blame the United Nations. I'll blame Joe Biden. I'll blame Obama. I'll blame Nancy Pelosi. 

I'll blame Satan himself. I'm happy to blame all sorts of people and all sorts of forces for problems in America. But we also have to put a healthy dose of blame on ourselves. Capitalism is made only for a moral and religious people. It's true for the customers in a capitalist system. It's true for the producers in a capitalist system. 

It's true for the business owners. And it's proof once again that if we really want to save this country, if we deeply, profoundly actually want to save this country, it cannot be done just by winning an election. It cannot be done just by increasing our GDP. It cannot be done by any secular means. And there can be good secular things that we should and must do. 

But this country can only be saved if we, individuals, become moral and religious people. And of course, John Adams was talking about Christianity when he said, religious, the most important and only reason to save souls. is for its own sake. So people, souls go to heaven for all of eternity. That's why we need to spread the gospel and save souls. It just so happens that a nice side effect of that happening is we live in a much better country. 

And that's a nice, noble goal as well. So in conclusion, capitalism is only for a moral and religious people. Thanks for listening to the podcast. MikeSlater . Locals . com is the website I have for the transcript and also no commercials over there. 

It is a mission of the Christian to fight Communism. Christians were Karl's number one enemy. And Communism is back in America.

Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thanks for being here. I would like to make the argument today that as Christianity wanes in a nation, communism necessarily will fill the void. Lots of things will fill the void. One of the things is communism and Islam. We saw both of those. 

There's a little foretaste of what could happen in this country with the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. There's two voting blocs that voted for Zohran, foreigners. And we went in great detail on my show today about South Asians in particular, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Countries like that, that Zoran himself is making a big deal of. Couldn't have won without him. So you have South Asians who come from a nation with zero Christian culture and Christian background at all. 

And they come to America with zero assimilation happening. And they either are communist, like literally like they're from Nepal and it's a communist country. And they come here and they're communist and they vote for the foreign communist, of course. Or they come here and they're easy converts to communism. So you have that voting bloc, which was massive for Zoran. And then you have young white women. 

just young women in general, among age and gender breakdowns, it was women 18 to 29, 81 % of them voted for Zoran. And you wonder, well, how could that be? Well, we actually just did a TV show. My opening monologue was about luxury beliefs and how for young women in New York city, many of them very wealthy, college educated. It's a sort of status symbol voting for Zoran. It's a luxury belief in the way that, uh, an expensive purse or skiing in the Alps is a way to prove that, uh, I'm better than you. 

So I explain that in more detail on the TV show. We just recorded it. We'll make it into a podcast here today or tomorrow or sometime here soon. But I want to talk about the relationship between Christianity and communism here for a minute. And Islam thrown in here as well. Communism and Islam have been strange bedfellows for a while. 

During the 20th century, the Soviets and Muslim countries joined forces a lot. And a lot of that was political reasons to ally against the Western nations. But they're also, at the beginning, anti -Christian. So of course they will unite. All you need to know about communism and Marxism, you can learn by studying Karl. We're going to do a segment on this on my radio show, and I'll do it here on the podcast too, about Karl. 

Karl was a wretched person, Karl Marx. Wretched, horrible person in every possible way. He, Karl, hated Christians. A lot of people think of Marxism as a critique of capitalism, and it is. But first and foremost, it is meant to attack Christianity. Karl Marx wrote the famous line that He says religion, so here the full sentence is, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of a soulless condition. 

It is the opium of the people. He's talking about Christianity. It says Christianity is the opium of the people. Why did he hate Christianity so much? Well, he had personal reasons, which we'll get to when we do a biography of Karl. That's why I call it Karlism. 

I don't call it Marxism. I call it Karlism. When you understand Karl and what a wretched person he was, it's like, well, of course he came up with a wretched philosophy of life. He's a terrible person. But he said that Christianity is the opium of the people and Christianity was the target of his attacks because Christianity caused people and causes people to not care as much about how oppressed they might be. And he hated that. 

He saw that Christianity, it was an opium. It caused people not to feel the pain of oppression as much. It acted as a sort of balm. keeping people asleep in their victimhood. And he couldn't have that. He wanted people to be revolutionaries. 

But instead, Christians are thinking about the kingdom of heaven. He's like, he hated that. He said, you people need to wake up to how oppressed you are. And his whole goal was to make people awake, dare I say woke. Not dare I say, that's what that is. I mean, that's why woke is, how do I word this nicely? You see where it comes from? 

Carl says, oh, we need people to be awake. We need people to wake up to the oppression that they're feeling. And then the modern ghetto slang took wake up and turned it into be woke. And that's the term we've been living with this last, I don't know, five years or so is be woke. But that's what this all is. So Carl wants everyone to be aggrieved and discontent about the conditions that they're in so that he can lead a revolution. 

And the first step is to take down Christianity. Only then will people be properly discontent and aggrieved and become the revolutionaries that Karl wanted. People think of communism, again, as an anti -capitalist system, and it is. It's secondary, though. Primarily, first step, take down Christianity. A major component of Christianity is the heavenly kingdom. 

We're strangers, just a passing through. 1 Peter 2 .11, Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. The world is not our home. It's the classic hymn, this world's not my home. I'm just a passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. 

The angels beckoned me from heaven's door, heaven's open door, and I can't feel at home in this world anymore. Carl hated that. Carl is a materialist. The only things that exist are material. see and touch, that's it. There's nothing in this world except motion and matter. 

Christians are other worldliness, and communists are this worldliness. Also, Karl had a God complex. Karl wanted to be worshipped himself, and you can't have Christians worshipping God. I mean, the rest of that hymn is, Oh Lord, you know I have no friend like you. If heaven's not my home, then Lord, what will I do? It's about Lord. 

Lordship. And Karl would obviously have nothing of that. Communism is a secular religion. Christians believe that God made the universe and he knows everything. This is our American tradition as well. From the first colonists, pilgrims who came here in the 1600s, all the way through our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, classically, when he was requesting that at the constitutional convention, we open every meeting with a prayer. 

He said, I've lived a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? So our founders, the beginning of our country, the foundations of our country all believed in God and that he was involved in the affairs of man. Communists don't believe in God. They worship themselves. I think this line from a 1954 novel or autobiography, excuse me, called The Invisible Writing was written by a Marxist about his experience as a member of the Communist Party. 

He was talking to Christians. He said, we are believers, not as you are. We do not believe either in God or in men. We manufacture gods and we transform men. We will create a universe in our image without weaknesses. See, Carl was so prideful that he thought being a Christian and humble and all that was weak. 

Thought that was weakness. So communists now, 100 years later, this is in 1954, the person who wrote this, same thing. And the same thing today with people in 2025, they see Christianity as weakness. So he says, we're gonna create a universe in our image without weaknesses, a universe in which man, rid of the old rags of Christianity, will attain his cosmic grandeur in the supreme culmination of the species. That's where evolution fits nicely into the communist worldview. as well. 

But it's about we people, the communism transforming man, not the Holy Spirit. Marxism is a religion. It fills a God -sized hole in people's hearts, oftentimes with the outcasts of a society, which communism, of course, appeals to. It's a shame that quote -unquote outcasts can't find a place in the church. The church is open for everyone who believes. It's not a cool kids club. 

But communism speaks to a lot of people who feel rejected from society. Antifa is the militant wing of the communist party in America. And if you look at all the Antifa mugshots, they're all rejects, pink hair, whole thing. And it's just such a shame that here we have these people who are rejected, feel discontent, grieved against the system. The system's not working for them. And it's not working for them because a whole host of reasons. 

But let me just take a very basic example of you make terrible life decisions. You have no self -control. You have no discipline. You don't show up to work. You have to eventually get some job for minimum wage that you hate. You hate it long enough that then you hate the system itself. 

You hate capitalism. This is all like Karl. This is literally Karl's life, I'm describing it. And you hate the system, and then you have no belief in a higher power or an afterlife. And this is all there is, and you hate it. So you're going to take it all down. 

Do you see how this appeals to someone? How communism appeals to someone who lives like that? Communism also has its own Eden. Marx, Karl talks about the period of time before tribal ownership of land. This is a time when there were no classes, no social classes, no state, no private property. This is when people lived in harmony with each other. 

That's beautiful. And then there was the fall, the introduction of capitalism. And we're now living in a fallen world, according to communists. And it will be fallen until We can bring heaven back to earth. If only the workers of the world would finally unite, darn it. Then we'll have utopia again. 

" Now, after the 1900s, 1940s or so attempt at communism, a lot of communists in Europe said, well, why didn't the workers of the world unite? And they realized, or their thesis is, that we tried to get the workers to unite over class issues. And that wasn't enough to get people to see how aggrieved they are and how oppressed they are. So we also need to come up with all these other ways that people are oppressed. And that's where all the race, sexual orientation, all these other factors come in. This is where the rest of critical, all the other critical theories, critical gender theory, critical race theory, all these other things come in just to tell people, to make sure everyone knows, here's all these other ways you are also oppressed. 

Be aggrieved. Now will you unite us? Not just workers of the world unite, but oppressed peoples everywhere in the world unite? And the communists believe that when that happens, there will be a sort of second coming, not of Karl himself. He's dead, but it will be a return to the garden. In the words of William Foster, he was the leader of the Communist Party in America from 1945 to 1957. 

He said, the hundreds of millions of workers and peasants striking off their age old chains of slavery. He's talking about Christianity, right? The apostles. talk about being a slave to Christ. So he's talking about slavery, he's talking about Christianity. Striking off their old chains of Christianity will construct a society of liberty and prosperity and intelligence. 

Communism will inaugurate a new era for the human race. There's the secular heaven that they're striving for. Our college campuses used to be seminaries, right? All the Ivy League schools were seminaries where they used to teach the word of God. They're all now seminaries of Carl. Nearly every single one of them are all teaching communism. 

Every department in these universities. There are seminaries to Karl, preaching and indoctrinating students with communism. And it's appealing because for someone to be a Christian, you have to realize the depravity of your sin. For someone to be a communist, you have to realize the depravity of everyone else's sin. To be a Christian, you have to deny your sinful nature, as in put it to death. To be a communist, you have to deny the existence of a sinful nature. 

Revel in your pride, which is an easier pitch. We're gonna do a lot more on this moving forward. I dedicate myself to figuring out something, because Zoran, to his credit, he was able to accurately touch on something that is real, and that is he calls it the affordability crisis in New York City, and it's true. And it's not just in New York City, it's across the country. This is a real problem. It's very easy for people who don't have capital to be anti -capitalist. 

It's very easy for young people who are now not that young anymore, 30s, 40s, who don't own anything, are just saddled in student debt, to hate the system. And capitalism is appealing to them. And then it'd be easier if they're not Christians. So I want to be able to speak to that. We need to solve that politically. It's a very, very big problem. 

So we will do more of that. But it is also our job as Christians to fight against communism in every way. I'll end with Pope Pius XI. He said of communism in 1937, he said, communism offers the world as the glad tidings of deliverance and salvation. Everything we've been talking about here. It is a system full of errors and sophisms. 

It's just silly. And it would be, it's, it's also silly. And it would be even sillier if it, if the fruit of it didn't result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nations that have tried it. It is in opposition, both to reason and to divine revelation. It subverts the social order because it means the destruction of its foundations because it ignores the true origin and purpose of the state. because it denies the rights, dignity, and liberty of human personality. 

See to it, venerable brethren, that the faithful do not allow themselves to be deceived. Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever. Fight against communism. MikeSlater . Locals . com. 

Transcript commercially free on the website MikeSlater .

It's time for my annual lament as to what our holy days have become. But the good news is, we can reclaim them right now.

Welcome to Politics by Faith. Thanks for being here. It is October 31st, so it is time for my annual lament about the holiday season and what the holidays have become in our secular pagan country. All of the holy days that we have on our calendar used to be, I should say, all of our holidays that we still have on our calendar used to be holy days. It's a better way of putting it. Thanksgiving started off as a day of prayer and fasting. 

Fasting. Thanksgiving used to be, used to be a day of not eating. And now it's a day of football and gluttony. Christmas was about the birth of Jesus. Now it's Santa and presents. Easter was about the resurrection of Jesus. 

Now it's an Easter bunny and eggs. St. Patrick's day, even it was a day at St. Patrick or Patrick was this guy. He's born in England. It's not even an Irish. And he was abducted and he was put on a slave ship to Ireland. And he spent six years there, six years there. 

And then he escaped to his home country, became a Christian, went back to the people who enslaved him. to spread the gospel to these lost people. And now it's drink green beer and pinch me. And so I was like, this hit me, I think it was like five years ago. And it was around Halloween. I've never really liked Halloween, but it was like, especially meaningless, whatever shred of meaning there even was. 

And I was like, this is really, like, what is this? Like, what is this silly thing? And I looked it up and turned, Halloween is All Hallows Eve. Hollow, meaning sacred. Webster's original dictionary definition, 1828, to make holy. Hollow means to make holy, to consecrate, to set apart for holy or religious use, to devote to holy or religious exercises, to treat as sacred. 

as in our father hallowed be thy name. And Eve, All Hallows Eve, day before All Saints Day. All Hallows Eve, kind of put it together, Halloween. That's where that came from. But what's All Saints Day? I mean, think about this. 

Even Halloween used to be a religious holiday, and now it's pagan. Even worse than pagan, right? It's like satanic in many ways. So I'm talking about All Saints Day. and give you the encouragement that your house can be whatever you want it to be. Your home does not have to be influenced by culture in any way at all. 

You can do anything. It doesn't matter how you grew up. It doesn't matter the things you did when you were a kid or what your parents did. You can do whatever you want. 

You're an adult. 

Think about it like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or was it Home Alone 2? No, Home Alone 1 when he got a cheese pizza. He said, I got a large cheese pizza and it's all for me. That's you with the holy days that are in your house. You can do whatever you want. So celebrate All Saints Day if you want. 

So I was reading yesterday a sermon by Jonathan Edwards called The Reality of Conversion. And he was, in this sermon, articulating all the reasons why we know conversion exists. What is conversion? Of course, we'll go from a unbeliever to a believer, being born again, as we would put it today. And one of his proofs for the reality of conversion is martyrs. And I just want to read like three different paragraphs here about the existence of martyrs and how this creates evidence of such a thing as a change of nature by a supernatural power in their enduring such 

suffering for a good conscience and the glory of Christ. A very great alteration in life and manifestations of holiness of heart in doings is a great argument of a change of heart. " He said, many thousands, yay, and millions of professing Christians that have had this trial have acquitted themselves so under it as to give the most remarkable evidences of a supernatural love to God. and a weanedness from the world, like they've weaned themselves off the world. For they have been tried with the most extreme sufferings and cruel tortures that man could invent. I'll give you one of those in a minute. And the sufferings of many of them have been lengthened out to a very great length. Their persecutors have kept them under trying torments that if possible, they might conquer them by wearing out of their spirits. But yet they have rather chosen undergo all and have held out in suffering unto death rather than to deny Christ. Such has been their faith, and their love, and their courage, that their enemies could not by any means overcome it, though they had him in their hands to execute their will upon them. And very often they have suffered all with the greatest composedness of spirit, yea, and with cheerfulness. And many of them have appeared exceedingly joyful under the torments, and have glorified in tribulations." Amazing. Many have braved it out through an extraordinary stoutness and ruggedness of spirit. But so it has been with multitudes of all sort. 

Many that have been under the decays of old age, long after the strength of nature has begun to fail. And they were in that state wherein our want very much to lose their natural courage. And also women, even children, and persons of delicate and weak constitution, such as these have by their faith and love to Christ and courage in his cause conquered the greatest and cruelest monarchs of the earth. In all the most dreadful things that their power could inflict upon them, they have rather chosen to suffer such affliction than in the least to depart from their dear Lord and Savior. " These are just the parts I've underlined. Whoever reads the histories that give an account of these things must needs acknowledge, if they don't put out the light of reason, like if you're not a total fool, that those persons had something in them far above nature. 

that they were influenced by some supernatural and powerful principle that men naturally don't experience. And many of those that have thus patiently and joyfully suffered such things before their change were very loose, vain persons, contenders of all religion. Many that were cruel persecutors themselves have been seized with conviction and have then at last borne witness to Christ and his gospel by a patient suffering his will, a remarkable instance in which they have been blessed, which we have in the blessed apostle Paul. He goes and he talks about the state that people were in before they were saved. And yet here they are now. And one more part here. 

I'll end on this. I'll end on this line. It requires something above nature to make a man love an unseen object. So as cheerfully to lose all things and suffer all things for his sake, nature doesn't work in that manner. It may work so as to cause men to have a strong love to an object that they've seen with their bodily eyes and have conquered and conversed with. But it is beyond the power of nature to beget such a love to an object that they are told of. 

of which they are informed that he lived on earth many hundreds of years ago and now lives in an invisible world. Nature may operate so as to cause transient affections about that which they are so informed of, but not to knit the heart so strongly to an unseen object as to have such great effect as these. Only some mighty work of God alone hearts, changing their natures and infusing principles that strengthen them and carry them far beyond the strength of nature would be possible. Great stuff there from Jonathan Edwards. Now, if that's true for us, if we've been converted, if we've been saved, if we've been born again, do we act like it? 

Do we celebrate it? Are we grateful for it? Do we live like it? Do we tell people about it? Do we tell people about our salvation as if we were going to spend eternity in hell? But instead now we're going to spend eternity in heaven. 

Now it'd be nice if our society were a Christian society again. And we had these holy days set up around the calendar to remind us about what's really important. All the holy days that we had on the calendar have been secularized or eliminated entirely or secularized and become meaningless. So again, I just want to encourage you to make these holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, whatever you want them to be, whatever they should be, whatever they used to be. You don't have to be sucked in by the culture to make them pagan. It's your home. 

It's your family. And I would argue that if we stopped wasting our time with Halloween and made it All Saints Day again, we'd live in a better country. Because people would know the stories. They would know the stories of the people we should be emulating. We'd have heroes. Reminders of what's important. 

I always think of the story Perpetua. I'm gonna share two here, but Perpetua I gotta share. I share it every time. She lived in the year 203 under a brutal Roman emperor. She refused to worship the emperor and she was thrown in jail. She was to be executed at the next gladiator games. 

And her father visited her and begged her, pleaded with her to recant her foolish Christian beliefs, this invisible God and do it for you. You're only 22 and do it for your baby. You have a full life and you need to be here for this baby. So just do it, just recant, even if you don't really believe, or if you do believe, but you just say you don't, just so you can be free and live. Just recant it so you can get out of prison, give up your pride. Just say you're not a Christian, you'll be set free, and then you can continue to do whatever you want, but just say whatever you need to say. 

And she refused. In prison, her father visited her in prison, and she said, Father, do you see that bowl there? What is that? He said, that's a bowl. She said, of course. Could it be called by any other name than what it is? 

She said, well, neither can I. Be called anything other than what I am. 

A Christian. Couldn't lie, even when it led to her death. Which it did. at the Gladiator Games. She couldn't lie. What if we had All Saints Day, a day where we celebrated the martyrs of the Christian faith? 

What if this day was, once again, about heroes, martyrs? What if we changed the stories that we told in our country? There was an emperor in Rome, Julian. One of his main goals was to decrease the influence of Christianity in culture. He wanted to water it down. He wanted to create division in it. 

He wanted, he did, bring in more paganism. In schools, no Christianity. was able to be taught. Also, Christians couldn't be taught the classical texts, like the pagan texts, which means they couldn't rise up into the higher classes of power and influence. He just wanted to keep Christians down as much as he could. His goal was to marginalize Christians. 

So he would do some things, like a lot of unjust things, obviously. One would be if a Christian broke a minor law, then they'd get the book thrown at him. But if pagans committed crimes against Christians, then they'd get a slap on the wrist. We see versions of this today. There's nothing new under the sun. Everyone in our culture should know the name Artemis. 

He was a military leader, was a Christian. Two priests were tormented and executed, or so they were, they were exiled and then they died when they were exiled. And Artemis said that the emperor was possessed by Satan. The emperor didn't like this. So the emperor got him, tortured him. They pressed him between two rocks. 

It was so horrible. His bowels squeezed out and his eyes popped out of his head, but he lived. momentarily, but he lived. He lived enough where he had another chance to denounce Jesus, but he didn't. So the emperor beheaded him. I just think of a society that knows that story and thinks on that story, meditates on that story, lifts up that type of conviction. 

Hebrews 12 21 says, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. How would we act if we knew that these great martyrs were watching? They are our example. They are our model. 

And if we don't lift them up, how will people know what to do? 

We wouldn't. We'd flounder. We'd be tossed to and fro. And we have been. But we can't anymore. We're called for more. 

The truth is out there. The answers are out there. The models are out there. The martyrs are out there. In your home, in your family, let's bring them back. Make sure that your kids know the martyrs of our Lord. MikeSlater . Locals . com. Transcript commercial free. It's on the website MikeSlater .